Hi there, On Wed, 28 May 2025, Ash via Freedos-user wrote:
... looking to install FreeDOS as the OS on ... .../optiplex-790-customer-brochure.pdf. Does anything here immediately jump out as incompatible or troublesome ...
No. It isn't clear to me from the document exactly which of the options available you will have installed on the computer but I guess that you will need some way to transfer the FreeDOS OS to the computer. If all else fails you could do that by moving the hard drive from the Dell to another computer where you have a copy of the FreeDOS image. It isn't particularly difficult. As Mr. Essin says you could try a USB floppy, sometimes there are issues but I've used that route on other machines. If you can read CDs on the Dell, then FreeDOS can be written to a CD and I'm sure installed directly from there but I've never done that, I've only ever used floppies and USB sticks to install.
From my experience with DOSBox and DOSBox-x
FreeDOS on bare metal is not really like those. It's like MS-DOS.
Would any aspect of this computer inherently threaten compatibility?
I wouldn't expect any problems. Obviously it has a lot more RAM than is needed for DOS.
I intend to fully go down the rabbit hole ...
It's a very deep hole. Don't say I didn't warn you. :) The great thing now compared to when I started with DOS in the 1980s is that there's a vast amount of information online just waiting for you to read it. -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
